How should homosexuals be treated?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Usually considered reconciled

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

This contradiction is far sharper in English than in Hebrew, and the disparity is itself the key. Leviticus 20:13 prescribes death for a specific sexual act: 'If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman... they shall surely be put to death.' 1 Kings 15:11-12 reports that Asa 'did that which was right' and 'took away the sodomites out of the land.' The English 'sodomites' makes it sound as though Asa applied a lesser penalty (removal/exile) to the very class Leviticus says must die. But the Hebrew word in 1 Kings 15:12 is qedeshim — literally 'holy ones,' 'consecrated ones' — a term for cultic personnel attached to a sanctuary, not a label for men who engage in same-sex intercourse.

The identification of qedeshim with male homosexual temple prostitutes is a translation tradition, propagated through the Septuagint's renderings and codified by the King James translators, who read their own moral categories back into an obscure cultic term. Modern critical scholarship has largely abandoned that equation. Phyllis Bird's study 'The End of the Male Cult Prostitute' argues that the evidence for qedeshim as homosexual prostitutes is wholly inferential and overdetermined; Mayer Gruber's work on the qedeshah and her cognates shows that the Hebrew and Akkadian terms denote a cultic office whose duties are not demonstrably sexual, let alone homosexual. Saul Olyan's analysis of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 treats those verses as addressing a sex act between men in their own right, with no necessary connection to cult prostitution. The upshot is that 1 Kings 15:12 and Leviticus 20:13 are not talking about the same thing: the Kings text reports the removal of syncretistic cultic functionaries (the Deuteronomistic Historian's recurring concern with purging foreign worship — compare Jehoshaphat removing the remnant of the qedeshim in 1 Kings 22:46, and Josiah breaking down the houses of the qedeshim in 2 Kings 23:7), while the Leviticus text legislates a sexual prohibition. Even Robert Gagnon, writing from a conservative position in *The Bible and Homosexual Practice*, agrees that the two verses operate on different objects. This is why the contradiction as cited dissolves: it is built on a KJV lexical artifact.

There is, however, a genuine tension in the vicinity that the entry's chosen verse fails to demonstrate. Nowhere in the Deuteronomistic History or Chronicles is a single Israelite executed for same-sex intercourse under Leviticus 20:13. The narrative response to the qedeshim is consistently expulsion (Asa, Jehoshaphat) or destruction of cultic infrastructure (Josiah), never capital punishment of individuals for the sex act per se. Jacob Milgrom argues in his Anchor Bible *Leviticus* that the Holiness Code's death penalties were often more rhetorical-legislative — declaring the gravity of an offense — than judicially executed, and the broader observation that biblical capital statutes rarely show evidence of enforcement is well established. So the tension the entry gropes toward — between the lethal Levitical statute and the milder, non-capital practice recorded in the historical books — is real; 1 Kings 15:12 is simply the wrong hook for it, because that verse is not about the Levitical offense at all. Mordechai Cogan's Anchor Bible *I Kings* reads Asa's removal of the qedeshim straightforwardly as a measure of cultic reform, not as the punishment of a sexual offense.

Where the critical reading lands: weak as cited, owing to the qedeshim/'sodomites' mistranslation that modern critical scholarship has set aside. A distinct and more defensible tension exists between the Holiness Code's death penalty and the narrative books' actual practice, but it is not demonstrated by the verse the entry pairs against Leviticus 20:13.